Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“Follow me.”

I had trouble getting up, so she helped me to my feet and led me down the corridor and into a side room. She unlocked the door and we entered.

Another decor change from the way I remembered these rooms. Cheap and cheerful in my day, now fussy Victorian: a four-poster bed hung with silky drapes, pictures of ballerinas and puppies lost in string, chintzy mirrors, clocks, sinister-looking china dolls. I couldn’t have imagined a worse room in which to try to get an erection and fuck a stranger. But maybe the girls were so bloody great it didn’t matter what the interior decoration was like.

“You can take a shower and I’ll have someone go out and buy you a change of clothes. Thirty-two trouser and a large for a shirt, is it? Aye, looks like it. Well now, ok. And do you need a girl on the house?”

“No.”

“Fine, I’ll bring you clothes and let you get on with things. You can freshen up and get your shite together, but you can’t stay long. You certainly can’t stay over. If the Guards are looking for you, for anything serious, I don’t need it coming near my house.”

“I understand, I’ll be out of here within the hour. Oh, and if you could bring me a needle and a strong piece of thread, that would help too.”

She nodded, left the room. I lay down on the bed and began pulling off my clothes. I checked the straps around my artificial foot; sometimes you got chafing on the stump, but everything looked ok. I put it back on. A knock at the door.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Lara, with your tea,” she said.

I opened the door extremely cautiously, in case of trouble, but it was nothing more invidious than the gray-eyed hooker with a teapot on a tray. Behind her, in the corridor, a man wearing a pig nose was naked, on all fours, being led by another Russian girl dressed domina-trix-fashion in leathers and spiked boots. Probably the chief justice of Ireland, the chief constable of Dublin, someone like that.

“Will that be all now, sir?” Lara said, having rehearsed the phrase to sound like an Irish girl.

“If someone could get me a T-shirt, it would be great. This one’s ruined.”

“Very well,” she said and closed the door behind her.

I drank some tea and ate a couple of the chocolate biscuits that came with it. They’d also provided that needle and thread. I started running the shower to get the hot water warmed up.

I picked the phone up from the bedside table. I found Bridget’s number at the Europa.

Well, this was it. Your last chance, my dear. She’d have to be pretty bloody convincing. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…

I dialed the Europa Hotel, got through to her room.

“Who’s this?” a man asked.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“Moran.”

“I want to speak to Bridget, this is Michael Forsythe,” I said.

“Hold on,” the man said with cold anger.

“Michael, are you in Belfast?” Bridget asked urgently.

“Am I hell. I’m not in the grave, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Despite your best efforts I am still walking the same planet Earth as you,” I said.

“Michael, I don’t have time for this, come to the point,” Bridget muttered impatiently.

“Honestly, this is getting very tiresome,” I said.

“Tiresome for me, too. What are you talking about?” Bridget yelled.

“Your boy tried to kill me, as if you didn’t know,” I said.

“What boy?”

“Your boy, the cab driver. Surprise, surprise, he knew my name and he tried to fucking kill me.”

Bridget considered the information. Her breathing became shorter and she sounded irritated.

“Michael, I don’t know what is going on. If someone tried to kill you, it was nothing to do with me.”

“Bridget, I know you’re playing. Do you think I am that stupid?” I said, a half-rhetorical, half-real query.

“Michael, believe me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t send anyone to kill you. Why would I do that when I could have killed you in Peru?”

Fair point.

“You didn’t send someone to the airport to meet me?”

“No.”

I leaned back in the leather chair, tapped the phone against my forehead. Just exactly how good was she? Was she good enough to send two hit teams at me in two days, fail in both the hits, and still convince me that she wasn’t trying to knock me off?

“Bridget, I know it was you, I-” I tried to say but Bridget cut me off.

“Listen to me, you worthless shit. You killed my fiancé and I’m giving you a chance to fucking balance the ledger. My daughter’s gone missing. Do you understand? I don’t know what the fuck you’ve been doing in Dublin, I don’t care. I need your help. The most precious thing in the world to me is Siobhan. Not you or what you’ve been up to, you son of a bitch. I don’t have the time to talk to you anymore. I’ll be in the Europa, you’ll either come or you won’t, it’s up to you. You are not my concern right now. Ok? I have a million things to do, so I have to go. Hell with you, Michael, useless as fucking usual.”

She hung up.

I listened to the dial tone and then the recorded operator told me to put the phone down. Jesus. Where did that leave me? It was back to the original question. Was she good enough to hit me and still make me come to her in Belfast?

I groaned, put my head in my hands.

She was.

What was happening to me? What kind of an idiot had I become? Was my judgment going? Either that or a possibility that was worse. Maybe I really didn’t buy it, maybe I didn’t believe her at all. I didn’t believe her but I wanted to go to Belfast anyway. I was being drawn to her even though I knew it would bring death. I wanted to see her this one last time whatever the cost.

Was that what was going on?

I shrugged. Nah. It wasn’t as complicated as that. I simply believed her. She was telling the truth. What was happening to me had nothing to do with her. It was a coincidence. I had more than one enemy in the world, after all, and maybe I had several in Ireland. And by now, my presence was known about and advertised.

I removed the duct tape, took my trousers off, and climbed into the shower.

Quick shower. Quick dry.

I wrapped the towel around me and sat on the end of the bed. I ripped off a piece of pillowcase, dipped the needle in the hot tea, and double threaded it. I grabbed the flesh on either side of my knife wound. Easy does it. I pushed the needle through the epidermis, threaded it over the wound, drove it through the skin on the other side of the cut. I repeated the procedure five times in a crisscross pattern and gently pulled the stitches tight. When the wound was together, I tied off the thread, wiped away the blood, applied a bit of pillowcase as a bandage, and rewrapped the duct tape around the whole thing.

I spent a while recovering from the waves of pain and then I started dressing.

There was a knock outside. Ah, Lara with the T-shirt. I pulled on my trousers and opened the door.

Not Lara. A six-foot-four bald guy with a goatee, a black suit, narrow slits for eyes, and a six-shot.38 revolver in his meaty paw.

“What the fuck is all this?” I asked. “The lady of the house and I have an arrangement.”

“Are you Michael Forsythe?” he asked in a Belfast accent.

If I hadn’t learned in the last ten years, certainly the last two days had taught me the inefficacy of answering to that name.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Oh, you don’t need to know who I am. Put your hands on your head and make like a fucking statue. One move and there’s a bullet in that bandage in your gut.”

I put my hands over my head. The man rummaged through my things and found my passport. That wouldn’t help him. I was called Brian O’Nolan on that. Still, he looked at the picture and at me and compared it with a mental picture.